The spring 2012 issue of The Paris Review just dropped in the newsroom — issue No. 200 of the venerable quarterly founded by George Plimpton, Peter Mathiessen “The Snow Leopard”) and a few other usual suspects.

(It was founded in 1953, so they apparently missed a few issues.)

As you might recall, Wilmington writer John Jeremiah Sullivan (“Pulphead”) is on the Paris Review masthead as “Southern editor.” And if you wonder what a Southern editor does, Sullivan shows us in a long lead-off essay, “The Princes: A Reconstruction.”

It reconstructs a bizarre incident from colonial South Carolina history which managed to jump the Atlantic and had at least a mild ripple effect on Western intellectual history. This is the sort of riff that Simon Schama normally does, only Sullivan does it, and extremely well.

The “princes” were two Indians — Creeks, or possibly Choctaws — who toured the capitals of Europe between 1719 and the early 1720s as something between a natural-history exhibition and a carnival sideshow.

Europe, or rather most of Europe, had seen Native Americans before, but these two fellows — there were originally three, but one disappeared along the way — were different.

For one thing, they were covered from their necks to their ankles in elaborate blue-black tattoos, sometimes described as “hieroglyphics” — patterns of suns, fantastic animals and intricate geometric designs that clearly arose from Southeastern religious beliefs. Judging from period illustrations, they’d still be pretty striking today.

Their owner/impresario, an English “captain” named John Pight. claimed one was the son of a king and the other, the son of an emperor. Pight was clearly prone to exaggeration, and he can be caught making up details. We’re not even sure of their real names. Given the care that went into their body ink, though, they clearly had some status in their native society.

When they first went on display, one was a teenager and the other was in his 20s. They were sometimes assumed to be brothers, but they most likely came to different communities.

In London, the Indians were introduced at court and were written about by Richard Steele (of Spectator fame) and (possibly) by Daniel Defoe. They passed briefly through Paris.where they became bit players in the notorious Mississippi bubble (a forgotten financial scandal that was as big in its day as the whole subprime mortgage fiasco), then spent a long time in Germany where — since few Indians had been seen there — they attracted a lot of attention.

Tracking their story gives Sullivan an excuse to detour into his usual exotica and to introduce all sorts of bizarre characters, such as Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and elected King of Poland, who wound up buying the two Indians.

(Augustus lived up to his nickname; according to contemporary accounts, he could bend horseshoes with his bare hands, and he allegedly fathered some 365 illegitimate children. He hadn’t been in line for the throne, except that his brother died of syphilis; “Augustus was expected to enjoy himself,” writes Sullivan, “a task for which he seems to have been uniquely equipped.”)

There’s even a local angle of sorts. Pight, a rather nasty Indian trader (more on that in a minute), was a member of the Goose Creek faction, a political-social clique centered around the Goose Creek settlement outside Charleston, S.C. One of his cousins was a militia leader named “Col. Moore.”

Well, brothers Maurice and Roger Moore were members of the Goose Creek faction who headed north during the Tuscarora War and liked what they saw of North Carolina. They founded Brunswick Town, and “King” Roger, of course, founded Orton Plantation, where he’s buried. Other Goose Creek friends, relations and in-laws 0f the Moores played a big role in settling this region.

Indian trading, in Pight’s day, had a dual meaning. He started off swapping trade goods for furs and hides, but as the fur trade declined due to overkill, Pight and other traders started dealing in people — basically buying captives who had been captured in inter-tribal wars and reselling them to other whites as slaves.

In the 1710s, buying and selling Indian slaves was big business — so big that it was blamed for sparking the Yamasee War of 1715-1717, in which the Yamasee, Chicasaw, Catawba, Shawnee, Creek and other Indian peoples (including the Cape Fear) united to attack white settlements in the Carolinas.

Had the Cherokees chosen to join the confederation, Sullivan notes, the whole South Carolina colony, including Charleston, might have been wiped out.

Pight distinguished himself in the fighting, leading a company of mostly Indian allies with some black slaves. (As Sullivan notes, he must have had some considerable charisma to hold such a force together in the forest.) He survived a massacre or two.

After the war, however, Pight was persona non grata in South Carolina, and the laws on Indian trading were rewritten to push slavers like him out of it. “He was not exactly banished from the colony,” Sullivan writes, “but he might as well have been.”

At this point, Sullivan speculates, Pight decided to take some of the last few captives who had come into his hands, head east and make some loot. Sullivan terms him a “monster,” and in his temperament, one catches a preview of such later Southern characters as Bedford Forrest — but, like Forrest, he had a certain style.

As for the two princes, they were last seen heading for St. Petersburg, Russia. Tired of religious conflicts — the Catholics and various Lutheran sects were fighting over who got to “save” the poor “savages” — Augustus the Strong had them dispatched as a gift to the Russian czarina Catherine I. Nobody really knows what happened to them next.

Copies of The Paris Review are $15 each and $40 for an annual subscription. Barnes & Noble at Mayfaire apparently stocks it; Books-a-Million, 3717 Oleander Drive, has Issue No. 199, but is expecting the later issue in a week or so. The journal’s website is http://www.theparisreview.org/, and subscriptions may be ordered online there.

[…] South Carolina history which managed to jump the Atlantic and had at least a … Read more on StarNewsOnline.com (blog) Sri Lanka's unending conflict In his essay Deeper Meaning of the Struggle (contained in […]

About This Blog

This is an emporium for all things literary: occasional book reviews, local book news, items about authors (mostly from the Cape Fear area but occasional visitors) and miscellaneous rants.

The usual author is Ben Steelman, feature writer and book columnist for the Star-News. He’s that shaggy, slightly smelly character you spot lurking in the back aisles of your local bookstore. Physically, he has more than a passing resemblance to Ignatius J. Reilly, hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” — some observers have noted other parallels as well.